Creativity and Innovation

One of the quirky things about the way that I dig into topics is that sometimes it’s like reading a book from the back to the front. I read the most recent things first before getting back to more foundational works. That’s absolutely the case with The Art ...

At some level we all would love to be a genius. The drive for mastery that was discussed in Drive is a part of how our new creative class of people operates. While many people are content to focus on a single area of mastery and expertise there are...

I’ve known for some time now that it’s better to be lucky than smart. The organizations and people that are successful are more frequently the result of luck than intelligence or skill. So, then the key question when you’re looking to compete is the o...

My reading list has been described by many, including my wife, as positively boring. I read about so many topics that most people would use to put themselves to sleep. However, this book is different. This book is about my positively all-time favorite...

I’ve been wandering around the land of innovation lately. I wrote a chapter for the Ark Group book Smarter Innovation: Using Interactive Processes to Drive Better Business Results . That chapter really followed up on the chapter I wrote for Unlocking Val...

Creativity seems to have some mystical property to it. It seems like some people are creative and others are not. It’s like someone is born to be an artist, and another person is born to be an accountant. In Creativity , Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi dispels th...

It was earlier this year when I was sitting in a room with a few hundred educators. These folks weren’t your normal educators though. They were attendees at the Pluralsight  author summit. They were there to learn more about how they could produce cou...

Designers think differently. Instead of what is minimally sufficient to get the job done, they think about how to make the experience one that the consumer will enjoy. Minimally sufficient is the right answer in some cases; but in the market place, it’s b...

In San Francisco at SPTechCon , I slipped into a session Bill English  was doing and he mentioned a book, Diffusion of Innovations . The context was that Bill was talking about where the groups innovators, early adopters, early majority, late majority, and...

Doubt is a natural and healthy part of the human experience so when Doubt: A History: The Great Doubters and Their Legacy of Innovation from Socrates and Jesus to Thomas Jefferson and Emily Dickinson  crossed my path, I was intrigued. What could I l...

Most people don’t think of Val Kilmer’s role in Real Genius as a defining moment.  They’d pick something else, like Top Gun, The Saint , or The Doors .  However, I’ve always been impressed with the capacity for range and the ability to embrace a charact...

I don’t think innovation comes from design. Then again, I don’t believe the way I think about design and the way Innovation by Design: How Any Organization Can Leverage Design Thinking to Produce Change, Drive New Ideas, and Deliver Meaningful Solutions  di...

What’s your innovation makeup? How are you wired? I’m not talking about the values that are described in Who Am I?  I’m not talking about your Myers-Briggs Type Indicator . I’m not talking about Enneagrams. (See Personality Types: Using Enneagram for Self-Di...

It’s the Medici family that is responsible – in part – for kicking off the Renaissance. By bringing together masters in multiple disciplines they allowed knowledge to flow across the boundaries of discipline and thereby they created the opportunities for i...

Conflict is a good thing. Conflict between our fingers and our thumb – our opposable thumb – created the ability to create tools and ascend to the most dominant lifeform on the planet. In The Opposable Mind: How Successful Leaders Win Through Integrative Thi...

I’m still in awe. I’m in awe of the organization that was the Lockheed Skunk Works. Ben Rich – who took the helm after Clarence “Kelly” Johnson – mixes personal stories of triumph and frustration into a compelling read in Skunk Works: A Personal Memoir of My...

With all of the books on innovation in the market, it’s a fair question to ask why I read Unleashing Innovation: How Whirlpool Transformed an Industry . There are two simple answers. First, it was recommended to me by a friend who felt like the book wa...

Somewhere deep in the recesses of our mind are the recesses from our grade school. Buried by decades of cruft, these memories and others call us back to the state that we had back then when we knew we were creative. It’s a time that we knew we were c...